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D. ENGLISH FEUDALISM and ITS ORIGINS Stephen D III–28 THE AGE OF PROPERTY: ANGLO-NORMAN AND ANGEVIN ENGLAND SEC. 3 It has often been discussed whether Magna Carta was the foundation of English liberties or a reactionary document extracted by a class or clique in its own interest. There is no simple answer. The majority of the clauses benefited the barons in some degree, and a number specifically detailed ways in which relations between king and tenants-in-chief were to be subjected to fixed custom. When a tenant-in chief died, the king could exact a ‘relief’—a substantial sum of money—from his heir before the heir could succeed; this was to be limited to £100 for earl or baron. If the heir was under age, his lands were in ‘wardship’, that is to say the king, or whoever was granted the wardship by the king, became the guardian of the heir and had possession of his property; the king furthermore had the right to dispose of heirs and heiresses in marriage. These rights were limited and defined by the Charter, to ensure that the heir was not cheated by his guardian, nor married beneath him. In these and other ways the barons saw to their own interests; but many other interests and privileges were also protected. By a long-standing tradition a new king swore at his coronation to keep Church and people at peace, to put down iniquity, and to show justice and mercy in his judgments. From time to time the coronation oath was developed into a charter, such as that issued by Henry I, which was known to the barons of Magna Carta; and from time to time kings repeated or developed their oaths on solemn occasions. In 1213 John himself had sworn a slightly altered version of the oath, which laid emphasis on the revival of good laws and the abolition of bad. The novelty of Magna Carta lay not in the fact that the king bound himself to maintain good law, nor that he issued a charter of liberties; but that the Charter should contain so elaborate and detailed a statement of important custom. We must not expect too much of it: it is a collection of clauses, not a rounded whole. But it was felt to serve a purpose; to limit the monarchy by defining the law. The Charter included an elaborate clause providing machinery for its enforcement by a committee of twenty-five barons, to be called into existence if the king broke the Charter. But there was no suggestion yet that such a committee might be a normal thing; that the duty of the king to consult his barons on important issues should or could be defined. Any such idea still lay in the future. The barons of Magna Carta felt they were dealing with an exceptional crisis; and when John himself was dead, the Charter was re-issued without any reference to the committee of twenty-five. From then on the Charter was often re-issued as a reminder to king and people that the king was not free to break these fundamental customs. A few changes were made; the forest clauses, for instance, were carried off into a separate charter. But what could make sense was preserved; and after 1225 subsequent re-issues showed virtually no further change. By 1225 the Charter was accepted by all parties; but it had not been so in 1215. The Charter gave King John a breathing-space, which he used to obtain from the Pope a bull condemning it as contrary to moral law and reprimanding the Archbishop, and to gather forces to crush his enemies. There is little doubt that he would have succeeded, had not a fresh outbreak of rebellion attracted the support of the King of France. In an elaborate, if somewhat absurd manifesto, the French court announced that John was deposed; and the French Dauphin was sent to replace him. John made rapid attempts to deal with his enemies, but after a summer and autumn of marching and counter-marching, and after losing his baggage- train (including all his jewels and valuable relics) in a quicksand at the head of the Wash, he succumbed to sickness and died at Newark in October 1216. D. ENGLISH FEUDALISM AND ITS ORIGINS Stephen D. White, in AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL HISTORY, 19 (1975) 138–55 R. Allen Brown, Origins of English Feudalism, New York, Barnes and Noble Books, 1973. xiii, 164 pp. $8.50. Medieval historians have been discussing the “origins” of English feudalism and the “impact” of the Norman conquest on English society for over a century; but they have been unable to agree about whether feudalism, or any of its elements, existed in pre-conquest England, or whether the conquest fundamentally transformed English society.1 What has become the “orthodox” position in this controversy was first 1 Only a very brief and schematic summary of this controversy will be given here. For fuller discussions of it with extensive bibliographical references, see C. Warren Hollister. ed., The Impact of the Norman Conquest (New York, 1969) and two articles by Hollister: “The Norman Conquest and the Genesis of English Feudalism”, American Historical Review, LXVI (1961), 641– 663; and “1066 The Feudal Revolution”, American Historical Review, LXXIII (1968), 708–723. SEC. 3D ENGLISH FEUDALISM AND ITS ORIGINS III–29 formulated in 1891 by J. H. Round, who claimed that William the Conqueror introduced “the feudal system” into England, where it had not previously existed. and that the conquest resulted in a cataclysmic break with the Anglo-Saxon past.2 Although F. W. Maitland believed that a form of feudalism existed in pre-conquest England and therefore questioned Round’s thesis,3 most historians accepted it, particularly after F. M. Stenton restated it in 1929;4 and during the 1930’s and 1940’s, it attained the full status of “orthodoxy”.5 In recent decades, however, a number of historians have challenged the so-called orthodox interpretation in a variety of ways. They have claimed that post-conquest feudalism had at least some pre-conquest roots and/or analogues, that it had developed much more gradually than Round and his followers had supposed, and that the changes that English society underwent between c.1050 and c.1200 were caused not simply by the conquest, but also by more general factors that transformed much of western Europe during the same period. These critics have therefore concluded that some form of feudalism existed in pre-conquest England, or that orthodox writers had seriously overestimated the impact of the conquest and underestimated the continuity between pre- and post-conquest English society.6 Nevertheless, other historians continue to accept the orthodox interpretation in some form, and the controversy over the origins of English feudalism and the impact of the Norman conquest still drags on.7 The controversy continues partly because historians still argue about highly specific and technical questions concerning English and Norman social and military organization before and after the conquest. But even if they were to reach agreement on the answers to these questions, the controversy would still continue because of their disagreements about what feudalism is and about what constitutes a satisfactory account of its origins. However, the participants in this controversy cannot possibly resolve questions of this kind without analyzing them closely, and unfortunately they have rarely done so. They have devoted their energies almost exclusively to studying difficult texts like Domesday Book, Hemming’s cartulary, the Red Book of Worcester, and the Oswaldslaw leases, to discussing obscure institutions like the servicia debita, the five-hide unit, the fyrd and the select-fyrd, laenland and bocland, sac and soc, the constabularia, and the trimoda (or trinoda) necessitas, and to attacking their opponents’ views about these various texts and institutions. But they have rarely explained what they mean by “feudalism” or “the origins of feudalism”, or directly expressed their underlying assumptions about medieval social structure and social change. Instead, they have generally presented their own views about these matters as self-evident truths that hardly need to be stated, let alone explained and justified, and have dismissed 2 J. H. Round, “The Introduction of Knight-Service into England”, English Historical Review, VI (1891), 417–443, 625–645, VII (1892), II 11–24; rpt. with additions in J. H. Round, Feudal England (London, 1895), 225–314. As Hollister notes (“The Norman Conquest”, p. 643), Round was attacking the views of earlier writers, particularly E. A. Freeman. 3 F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond. Three Essays in the Early History of England (1897; rpt. with an introduction by Edward Miller, London, 1961). Sir Paul Vinogradoff sided with Maitland against Round (see English Society the Eleventh Century (Oxford, 1908), 39–89). 4 Sir Frank Stenton, The First Century of English Feudalism 1066–1166, Second Edition (Oxford, 1961). First published in 1932, this work is based upon Stenton’s Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford for the year 1929. 5 Hollister writes that Round’s “notion of a Norman feudal revolution, asserted so boldly in the 1890’s, quickly rose to the Olympian heights of received opinion, and virtually all the research done by scholars in the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s served only to strengthen it.” (“1066: The ‘Feudal Revolution’“, 710). He points out that Round’s views were accepted by G. B. Adams, H. M. Chew, R. R. Darlington, Sidney Painter, Ferdinand Lot, Carl Stephenson, J. E. A. Jolliffe, and D. C. Douglas—as well as Stenton (see “The Norman Conquest”, 647–648 and nn. 32–39). 6 On the attacks against Round’s thesis by Marjory Hollings, Eric John, H.
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